The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. ~ Lionel Trilling

People buy a ticket. That ticket is their transport to a fantasy which you create for them. Fantasyland, that’s all, and you make their fantasies live. Fantasies of love or hatred or whatever it is. People want their fantasies over and over. People who masturbate usually masturbate with, at the most, four or five fantasies. By and large. Most people like the same food and they like the same kind of music, they like the same kind of sexual fantasy for a period of time, then maybe it changes. As it is in children. Who is it? Bruce Lee. That’s the hero. Then you grow up and grow out of your Bruce Lee period, or your PicassoBlue Period, and go into another period. ~ Marlon Brando

In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. ~ Jason Wilson

Fantasy service [extras] for the male readers, men are hen-pecked by their wives and their are wages are increasingly equal to women's so they like the rape scenes as they restore their sense of power. ~ Toshio Maeda

It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable. ~ Rod Serling

But films . . . it’s funny. People buy a ticket. That ticket is their transport to a fantasy which you create for them. Fantasyland, that’s all, and you make their fantasies live. Fantasies of love or hatred or whatever it is. People want their fantasies over and over. People who masturbate usually masturbate with, at the most, four or five fantasies. By and large. Most people like the same food and they like the same kind of music, they like the same kind of sexual fantasy for a period of time, then maybe it changes. As it is in children. Who is it? Bruce Lee. That’s the hero. Then you grow up and grow out of your Bruce Lee period, or your PicassoBlue Period, and go into another period. “But with kids, because they outpower us, because they have no representation, because they are so dependent, all they think about is power. Dinosaurs or the Million Dollar Man, because they feel so helpless, because they have no way out of it, except fantasy. Because they are only that tall. “And that’s all films are. Just an extension of childhood, where everybody wants to be freer, everybody wants to be powerful, everybody wants to be so overwhelmingly attractive that there’s just no doing anything about it. Or everybody wants to have comradeship and to be understood.

Your true adult, with fully-developed mind can enjoy fantasy whole-heartedly if it's written in adult words and thought-forms, because, being absolutely confident of his own mental capacity, he doesn't have any sense of embarrassment at being caught reading "childish stuff"....And every human being likes fantasy fundamentally. All we need is fantasy expressed in truly adult forms. Every author who honestly and lovingly does that makes a name on it. Lord Dunsany, Washington Irving, Stephen Vincent Benét.

A long time ago, in a conference room far, far away... it was ordained that sword-and-sorcery movies would be the Next Big Thing. Just imagine crossing the fantasy worlds of JRR Tolkien and George Lucas! Mythic reverberations! Megabucks! Didn't work.

"There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."

Thus, modern pleasure seeking according to Campbell is no longer related to the senses but to activities like daydreaming or fantasizing. The purpose of goods in this context is to act as props. They are the building blocs around which consumers create their pleasurable visions.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man. That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the powerplay: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Actually, it comes very naturally for me, because all day my mind drifts off into fantasies and little stupid jokes. For example, when Amelie looks out at the city and wonders how many people are screwing at that moment. I have those same kind of ridiculous questions all the time. [Holds up glass of water, points at the skyline.] Like now, how many people in this city are bringing a glass of water to their mouths? It's always been pretty easy for me to exercise my imagination. The other part of the brain, the one that does mathematics, is a nightmare for me. It doesn't work at all. When I was a kid, I used to escape from my family with my imagination, and I kept this spirit into my adult life. This doesn't always happen. All children have imagination, but for some it doesn't carry over.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Well, it came to me naturally, too. In literature, we think about and accept the fantastical style all the time, but in film, that's not always the case, especially in France. Sometimes they hate the style. They prefer ugly things, realisticmovies. I love to play with everything: the sound, the costumes, the camera.

"This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years.

It [fantasy literature] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them.

Maeda Toshio suggests that aside the theme of human selfishness, the hard-core rape and tentacle porn with which this manga and animation have become synonymous, are "Fantasy service [extras] for the male readers, men are hen-pecked by their wives and their are wages are increasingly equal to women's so they like the rape scenes as they restore their sense of power."

Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, it’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them.

Charles R. Saunders: As a reader, I was attracted to the action, the mayhem, the exotic settings, and the sheet imaginary power of the genre. Also, I was fascinated by the kinship between heroic fantasy and the ancient myth-cycles that were the world's first literature. The legend of Beowulf, for example, could easily have been marketed today as heroic fantasy. As for the unenlightened racial attitudes, I must admit that when I first encountered the genre, in the early 1960s, I did not pay very much attention to the racial content of the stories I read. It was only when I became deeply absorbed in the study of Africanhistory and culture that I took a second look at the fantasy I had been reading, and at that point I began to seriously question the racial content of some of it.

Fantasy literature, in its broadest definition from "Cinderella" to "Beowulf" to Stephen Donaldson, is literature which makes deliberate use of something known to be impossible.

Tom Shippey, in "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994).

Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.

J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (originally given as an Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews on 8 March 1939, and published in Essays presented to Charles Williams in 1947 (1939).

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon.

It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.

Evan Harris Walker, in The Physics of Consciousness : The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (2000).

Our writers, I believe, discern a resemblance between the world and their books. Through fantasy, they are saying something about life which could not be said within the naturalistic frame of reference.

In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches.